Chargers LB Cooper gives Oscar-caliber performance

“Coop orchestrated it very well. We had Peyton in the Pro Bowl (last February) and he's saying, 'Cooper's crazy yelling that stuff.' Just like a lot of things Peyton says, he doesn't mean anything.”

Cooper wasn't always telling the truth back there, not anymore than Manning was telling the truth in front of him. It became a pie fight of words. The linebacker did his best to mimic the great quarterback.

“Any time you go against Peyton Manning, it's tough,” Cooper said. “We tried to disguise things on him. We moved around and gave him a lot of different looks.

“When he was at the line of scrimmage, I was yelling so he couldn't check. We had success with it. There was so much noise out there as it was. We tried to confuse him.”

And so they had fun. The defenders were like kids left to their own devices in a toy store.

“It was fun; it was exciting,” linebacker Matt Wilhelm said. “It's great to have that leeway. We know the game Peyton plays. It was great to give it back to him. When he'd made a check, Coop would make a check. Ron trusts Coop. It was a linebacker's dream.”

Defensive end Luis Castillo got a big kick out of being kind of a lab rat in the experiment that worked.

“There are very few teams you can do that against,” he said. “Teams don't give you that much time at the line of scrimmage. But the Colts give you 10 to 15 seconds to do some things. The first few series, we were all over the place. I'd get started on the edge, and then I'd be over a linebacker and then on the other side. I lined up over four guys at one point.

“It was a function of where we are as a defense. We're mixing so many things up. The coaches are doing a great job. It was fun. It was really fun.”